An agent named Barrow greeted them at Heathrow baggage claim. "Lady Farnsworth ordered up an afternoon tea that would fell a horse. She's at the family home and so not there to oversee it. If we're not quick, those rascals will have eaten it all before you arrive."
Barrow and Lee chatted while the nondescript black sedan ate up the sixteen miles between the airport and Vauxhall Cross. Amanda was happy to listen and watch the miles slip away as they drew closer to the city center. The Thames was as gray as ever, as was the sky as they arrived at their destination. They were to leave their luggage, which would be moved to another car for the hundred-mile drive to Stroud in Gloucestershire, the home of Lady Emily Farnsworth.
Barrow was not exaggerating about the meal. Half of the conference table was overrun with a tea service, scones with clotted cream and jam, pork pies, petit fours, a mountain of strawberries, pear tartes and three kinds of sandwiches.
The indifferent in-flight meal had Lee ready to inhale the lot of it. Even Amanda, who'd not done much more than pick at food since the morning prior, thought she might eat a bite or two.
"A formal, proper, afternoon British tea." Lee said, recalling their morning two years ago. Amanda smiled at that.
"What's that, old boy?" Agent Barrow asked.
"We had a nice afternoon tea the Savoy two years ago before Amanda flew home from an assignment, but the joke was Amanda wanted a tea in the palace with QE2."
"This isn't the palace, but it'll do nicely," Amanda added. "Agent Barrow, thank you so much for facilitating this."
"Think nothing of it," said Barrow. "Lady Farnsworth has a tight schedule for you. I'm to give you half an hour to partake, and then you'll spend a little time with our sketch artist, Tom. Then I'm to leave you to call your Mr. Melrose and rush you out the door to the car. I plan to stick to that unless you need an alteration. The good lady wants you there in time for supper."
"Agent Barrow, there's so much food. Won't you stay and eat with us?" Amanda asked.
Lee agreed. "If you and Tom want to help us enjoy this, we'll get started on the sketch. We can work and eat and get on the road a little earlier."
Barrow spared them a rare smile. "I never turn down a good pork pie."
Tom joined them, and between delicious bites and steaming sips of tea, Lee and Amanda talked him through sketching the slightly-built man with a wispy beard and dark, unkempt hair who had disappeared at the first shot. Tom was skilled, and in a half hours' time, the meal was almost gone, and they had a reasonably good likeness of the mystery man. Barrow called for help faxing it near and far to begin the attempt at identification. Lee made sure to have them route the sketch to Paul's cover office at the U.S. consulate in Istanbul.
"We'll get ahold of you through Lady Farnsworth as soon as we learn something." Barrow promised. "You check in with your man, and we'll have the driver waiting for you downstairs. It's been a pleasure to meet you. I hope we'll meet again under more favorable circumstances."
Barrow closed the conference room door, and they were alone. Lee had watched Amanda over the course of their meal, and while she had finally eaten a little, she was still distracted and tense.
Field work always made her feel oddly detached from home, and more so this time with Turkey literally on the other side of the world. Amanda longed to leave the whole experience behind and go home like it didn't happen. The thought of telling someone in D.C. about the alley made an experience feel more real that didn't need the help.
"I don't want to do this," she finally said, pulling the phone across the table.
"I know." Lee wasn't sure what was going to help or hinder for the next few minutes. He ended up scooting his chair a few inches closer and leaving it at that.
Amanda dialed Billy's direct line and put in on speaker.
Their boss picked up halfway through the first ring. "Melrose."
"Good morning, sir."
"Good morning, Amanda. Lee?"
"I'm here." Lee sat up a little straighter in his chair.
Billy knocked on the glass and waved Francine into his office.
"Now I've read Mendoza's report. Amanda, I'm going to record this and have it transcribed. You can review it when you get home and make any edits and your report will be mostly done." Francine entered quietly and closed Billy's office door. He pointed at his assistant, silently sending a message – behave.
Francine held up both hands in surrender and took the chair nearest the door. She pressed the button on the recorder attached to the phone and nodded at Billy.
"Okay, I know you two have somewhere to be. I think I'm good up until the wharf. Just walk me through it from there."
Lee's hand was on the armrest of his chair. Amanda covered his hand with hers, and he turned it, so they were palm to palm, fingers laced together. Amanda's closed her eyes as she delivered her narrative to Billy.
"We were in the market a little after noon local. We shopped for nearly an hour before Lee was approached by a man we thought was our contact. I was 50 or 60 feet away. Two men entered from the wharf, right behind a ferry load of tourists and started shooting. The new crowd rushed in from the entrance and buried Lee and anyone shopping in the main aisle. I got low and was working my way toward Lee's last known position when a panicked man plowed over me and blew my concealment. One of the shooters, the smaller one, saw me and called out for his partner. They started after me. I didn't know Lee's status, but thought if I could draw them away, we'd both have a chance to escape. They didn't look like guys who do five miles before breakfast and I had a good lead, so I ran, and they gave chase.
"I ran about ten blocks and was doing ok until the alley. It was wide and looked like a cross street as I approached it, but it turned out to be fenced in on the far end. The shooters split up to search. The bigger one found me before I could break through the fence. He had a knife in his hand."
The natural rasp in her voice was like gravel now, but she plowed ahead. "He grabbed me by the arm, and I threw dirt in his face. He kicked me in the ribs, and I rolled away. There was a lot of garbage, and I looked for anything on the ground I could fight back with. I kicked him, and I hit him with a broken board." She swallowed hard. "There were nails in it. He bled…a lot…and it was over. I took his knife, the gun he fired in the market, and his wallet, and threw trash bags over him. Then I broke through the fence, and I stole a shirt and a scarf from a clothesline. I was hiding under the stairs of the apartments next door and planning my next move when Lee came through the fence and caught up with me."
She halted there, swiping at her nose and cheeks with her free hand. Lee pushed a stack of napkins toward her.
The line was quiet for a moment. Five thousand miles away, as he absorbed his junior agent's report, Billy's countenance was grim. His assistant's eyes were suspiciously bright.
"Mendoza's report said you were injured?" Billy asked gently.
"Yes sir, he got me with the knife, low on my left leg. Some other scrapes and bruises, but nothing more of note."
"Twenty-three stitches," Lee added.
"Right." Amanda nodded and wiped her eyes with a napkin.
"Let's back up and cover me," Lee suggested. "I was approached by a slightly built man, the one we had sketched this morning."
"It was coming over the fax just as you called," Francine offered.
"His recognition code was good. He said that Omar would join us soon. The shooting began, and if I had to give an opinion, I'd say he took off like he knew it was coming. In a matter of seconds, the main aisle was overrun with people trying to get away. I got a quick look at the shooters before I, and the vendor I was next to, and a bunch of other people were mowed over. There were people on top of me, and more on top of them. I banged my head pretty hard. The pressure from above got to be a problem. There was just no air, and it wouldn't let up. My vision tunneled down to almost nothing. I'm not certain I was conscious the whole time."
He glanced at Amanda again, and his narrative stuttered to a stop. Amanda had covered her mouth with a hand as tears streamed down her cheeks.
From the moment he'd been able to draw a complete breath again, Lee hadn't dwelled much on his experience in the market. Finding Amanda, making certain she was safe, and getting them back to shore and out of Turkey had been a worthy distraction. Even when intermittent flashes of bitter panic over not being able to breathe pinged away at his composure, a lifetime of practice compartmentalizing had held him in good stead…so far. Whatever his struggle was, he was able to bury it. Amanda was more important.
There was always time to reset at home after - a few days off, a few drinks, a few nights sleeping with every light in his apartment on. A conversation with Harry or a visit to Birchwood.
And in the last few months, the odd half hour sitting outside the lattice partition in Amanda's backyard, while the sounds of her life drifted through the open kitchen window. Sometimes open, at any rate. Open often enough that he didn't worry about the times it wasn't. When it was open, there were dinner conversations, the boys bickering, Amanda and her mother doing the dishes or folding laundry at the kitchen table. Sometimes when the rest of them were upstairs and Amanda was left to close things down for the night, he'd gin up an excuse to tap on the back door and say hello. Other times his thoughts were too muddled, and he'd just wait until she turned off the lights downstairs and go sit in his car until the light in her bedroom was extinguished, too. Knowing they were all safe at home made shaking off the detritus of casework easier.
They never talked about the window.
At some point, Amanda bought new white wood folding chairs for the patio. Three, to be exact, and while he sat in the one she'd left out back against the lattice, her mother asked why the third chair was languishing out in the yard instead of on the patio. Amanda rattled off a rambling explanation about a magazine article on feng shui and symmetry and how they were on clearance, and she couldn't return the third one, so she'd just leave it in the yard until she figured out what to do with it. Lee had heard the baffled expression on Dottie's face as clear as Amanda could see it, but like she had to with a litany of Amanda's other excuses, Dottie had shaken her head, poured a final cup of tea, and with a kiss to the crown of her perplexing daughter's head, headed up to bed.
They never talked about the chair, either.
Some sort of equilibrium always returned. Eventually.
It wasn't going to return while she cried over him in a conference room at MI6.
Lee cleared his throat and plowed on. "I got back to my feet, pretty dizzy, and started looking for Amanda, but she was gone. People were saying the shooters ran out the back, so I headed that way, and a few blocks down, one of the shooters ran across the street right across in front of me in a big hurry. I went into what turned out to be a dead-end alley. There were piles of trash everywhere and I was still fuzzy and must have walked right past the body. There were shoeprints in the dirt like Amanda's sneakers. The fence boards were loose, and I could tell where she'd gone through. That's when I caught up with Amanda, just like she said."
At this point Billy was pacing circles around his desk. "And you tried to get to the garage?" Billy asked.
Amanda coughed and cleared her throat. "That's right, sir. But the smaller man had looped around was watching the garage from the doorway of a shop a couple of blocks down, so we ducked into a little hotel and locked ourselves into a second-floor room and called you. We waited until after dark, got back to the wharf and took a speedboat. We got all the way back to the dock near our hotel, and CIA personnel were waiting for us there."
"We left a couple of the items Amanda collected at the scene with the CIA," Lee said. "The directorate will need the gun for their investigation, but I wiped it and the round in the chamber for our prints. We know where the money came from, so I gave it and the wallet to Paul. Amanda's blood is on the knife, and…well, the Turkish government can't have it. I checked it with my suitcase."
"Makes sense," Billy said.
Lee thought of something else. "Billy, did the report include the sighting of Anton Sidorov?"
"Not the overnight report from Mendoza, but it came across about two hours later."
"Well, Sidorov was so proud of himself that he chased us down in the Istanbul airport this morning to gloat. Amanda reminded him that we were alive and killed one of his goons, and he killed the other in a panic. He didn't get the satisfaction out of that exchange he was hoping for." Lee pressed a silent kiss to her knuckles. "He was completely disgusted. I'm going to smile about the look on his miserable rat face for weeks."
Billy grinned at Francine, who was distractedly reevaluating everything she'd ever thought or said about Amanda King.
"I have a question," Amanda said. "Why does the KGB have someone that stupid stationed somewhere that important? He could have killed us at Omar's and had a couple of days to cover his tracks. Now he has the Turkish government investigating Soviet activities."
"He is an idiot, and his uncle is Politburo. Nepotism is a thing, even for the reds." Billy sat on the corner of his desk and pinched the bridge of his nose. His two-day headache showed no signs of abating. "Between Mendoza's report and your accounts, I've heard enough to get the picture. What's your status, injury wise?"
"We're both pretty bruised up," Lee admitted. "I have a goose egg and might have a mild concussion. Amanda's stitches are actually rather nicely done. The Marine corpsman who sewed her up blushed every time he made eye contact with her, so he tried hard to do a good job."
Francie had a thought. "Amanda, that's no little scratch. How are you going to explain stitches to your mother?"
"Lady Farnsworth can help me with that. She and Mother hit it off when Emily visited and they have a little light correspondence going, Christmas cards and the odd letter. Mother gossips about the neighbors and Lady Emily gossips about the peers. I'll tell Mother that we had tea out with Emily and an old geezer futzed his parking brake, hopped the curb and rolled his red Citroen into the plate glass window near our table. I got cut. Emily can spin it up in her next letter. It tracks."
Billy marveled at her. "That's good thinking, Amanda."
"Thank you, sir. I didn't sleep much last night. Explaining my injuries away was one of the sheep I counted."
Francine asked, "Injuries, plural?"
"Amanda fought with a giant," Lee reminded them. "In addition to a six-inch cut, she has a bruise the size of a basketball from her left kidney all the way across her abdomen. Both elbows. Her-"
"Lee." Amanda halted him right there. "You should talk," Amanda muttered. "Paul said you looked like the loser in a cattle stampede."
"So?"
"Children, please!" Billy laughed. The light bickering was a familiar, welcome sound after the story they'd told. "I know you two need to get going, but I need to say a couple of things before you go. Amanda, I'm sorrier than I know how to say that you ended up in that position. I know it's hard not to dwell on it, but your judgement and actions were sound, just, and defensible and you have nothing to fear or regret on that account. Whatever you have to do, I always want you both to come home. And I'm as proud as I can possibly be of how you have both conducted yourselves under such trying circumstances. Now go have your weekend, and come back to us, because we have work to do."
"Yes, sir."
"You bet, Billy."
The line went dead, and Amanda abruptly shoved back from the table, scrubbing her face with a napkin. "There is no such thing as waterproof mascara."
Lee brushed away a smudge on her cheek. "No worries, you look good."
For a moment Amanda held his hand against her cheek, and finally nodded. "Let's get outta here."